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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

I am really upset whenever I hear someone was a victim of transphobia, but it especially saddens me when they are so young and are being marginalized by supposed grown-ups who are supposed to care about them.

A Michigan teen was voted homecoming king by his classmates, but his school then stripped him of the title. Their rationale: he's still registered as a girl.

According to Wood TV, Mona Shores High School in Muskegon, Michigan had in some ways accepted seventeen-year-old Oakleigh "Oak" Reed as a boy. Says Reed, "They let me wear a male tux for band uniform, and they're going to let me wear the male robe and cap for graduation." Teachers, he adds, "call me Oak, and they say, he, him, his." And when he campaigned for homecoming king (by simply posting the message "Vote for me for homecoming king" on Facebook), he won. But then he was summoned to the principal's office. Says Reed, "They told me that they took me off because they had to invalidate all of my votes because I'm enrolled at Mona Shores as a female."

2 comments:

I read this on Shakesville, and like Melissa said, it really is terrible that this young man had to endure this, but it is nice to see that he has a lot of community support, even if his administration is going about this the wrong way.

It can be so hard to be out in high school, so I was glad to hear that he was accepted by (most) people.